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Photography vocabulary · Editing & Retouching

Crop

Meaning in photography, with examples

/krɑːp/verbCore term

In photography, crop means: To cut away the outer parts of a photo to improve the composition, remove distractions or fit a particular shape.

In Turkish: kırpmak, kesmek

How it is used

Also a noun: a tight crop, a square crop. You crop in, crop out a distraction or crop to a ratio. Cropping lowers the pixel count, so heavy crops may not print well. A common portrait tip is not to crop people at the joints, such as knees or elbows.

Example sentences

  1. Crop out the exit sign on the left; it's distracting.

  2. I cropped the image to a square for the gallery's catalog.

Common collocations

  • crop tightly
  • crop out
  • crop to square
  • a tight crop
  • heavy crop
  • aspect ratioThe relationship between the width and the height of an image, written as two numbers such as 3:2, 4:3, 16:9 or 1:1.
  • framingDeciding exactly what is inside the edges of the photo and what is left out, and where the subject sits in the frame.
  • editTo improve photos after the shoot by adjusting things like exposure, color and cropping, and to choose which images to keep.
  • resolutionThe amount of detail in an image, usually given as its size in pixels (e.g. 6000 × 4000) or as how many pixels or dots fit into an inch when printed.
  • crop factorA number that compares a sensor's size with full-frame. Multiplying a lens's focal length by it gives the full-frame equivalent field of view.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Editing & Retouching

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